
ANAND HADGAONKAR
Anand Hadgaonkar is CIO Asia for Whirlpool. He is the regional IT leader, having created strategic partnership with business leaders to effectively align with IT and support key business initiatives. Hadgaonkar comes with expertise in building and retaining teams by hiring, developing and motivating skilled professionals.
The key strategic imperative at Whirlpool is to follow a “Cloud First strategy” to improve user collaboration, experience and improve cost productivity. Whirlpool India had been using MS Office 2007. Last year, when the product was reaching end-of-life, the organization moved to Google Suite. The project impacted around 2800 users from all functions across India. The initiative has enabled users to collaborate on their files with team members across the geographies, store files in Google Drives rather than local File servers, thus saving on local storage and backup. Additionally, Google Hangout rooms were implemented across all locations in the country. The initiative helped simplify IT Operations by reducing the IT incident count by around 15%, improving user experience and CSAT scores.